Thursday, 25 May 2017

Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual

Arthur Schopenhauer, in his essay called "Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual,"
points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your
lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though
composed by some novelist.

Events that when they occurred had seemed
accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable
factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that
plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an
aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your
whole life is composed by the will within you.

And just as people whom
you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the
structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as
an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears
together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously
structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as
though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single
dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything
links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the
universal will in nature.

It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic
image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every
crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the
other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to
everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as
though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes
some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or
has lived the life that he quite intended."